Hare (Reaktion Books - Animal)
Simon Carnell
Language: English
Pages: 230
ISBN: 1861894317
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Once described as the “fastest, hairiest, most lascivious, and most melancholy” of mammals, the hare was also believed to never close its eyes, occasionally grow horns, and have the ability to change its sex. More than just a speedy, but lazy, character in popular children’s fables, the hare is remarkable for its actual behavior and the intriguing myths that have developed around it. Here, Simon Carnell examines how this animal has been described, symbolized, visually depicted, and sought for its fur, flesh, and exceptional speed.
Carnell tracks the hare from ancient Egypt, where a hieroglyph of a hare stood for the concept of existence itself, to Crucifixion scenes, Buddhist lore, and Algonquin creation myths, to the serial works of Joseph Beuys, and even to an art installation in a Dutch brothel. The hare shows up in both surprising and expected places—it was the principal subject of the first hunting treatise, it appears in the first signed and dated picture of a single animal, and it was credited in early medicine with the most curative properties of any animal.
Combining recent natural history with an extensive and richly illustrated focus on visual art, Hare is highly accessible and packed with details about a historically fascinating animal.
negative significance. Among the names heaped upon it in ‘The Names of the Hare’, a medieval poem couched in the form of a charm designed to divest it of its power, are ‘the one who makes you shudder’ and ‘the one who makes you flee’, as well as ‘the creature that none dare name’.2 In parts of Britain even into the twentieth century it was considered by fishermen bad luck to utter the word ‘hare’ at sea, whilst a hare seen running through a village street presaged an outbreak of house-fires.3
images, surviving into the Renaissance in variously altered and elaborated forms. Other positive appearances of hares in Christian texts include their role as exempla of divine providence manifesting itself in every detail of the Creation. St Basil, in a passage demonstrating that ‘beasts bear witness to the faith’ reflects upon the fact that ‘the easiest animals to catch are the most productive’, and explains that ‘it is on account of this that hares and goats produce many little ones, for fear
definition of ‘perseverance’ as ‘a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success’, a definition which he illustrates with verses describing the losing lepus: ‘Where is the hare … / He sleeps, like a saint in a holy place,/ A winner of all that is good in a race.’54 And from Malthus’s use of it to argue how population increase must be arrested or ‘put to sleep’ (like the hare), in order to allow limited food resources (the tortoise) to catch up with it,55 to a recent work of pop
Somervile no doubt writes with a period awareness of objections to hare hunting which were part of a general change in sensibility with regard to animals. As do Addison and Steele when they give an account of their fictional Sir Roger de Coverley sparing a hare he has hunted and keeping it instead as a pet. The poet William Cowper’s prose account of his own keeping of several hares as pets was much read and admired.43 James Thomson, in a passage in his The Seasons, can stand here to illustrate a
leaping over a stylized, gilded pyramidal form. The same cast of a hare was used twenty years later for Six-foot Leaping Hare on Empire State, possibly in response to the 9/11 attack on New York. In Hare and Helmet, by placing an unnaturally standing, anthropomorphized hare upon military headgear, Flanagan also evokes in simplified form one of the themes explored by Beuys. We might even detect in Hare and Bell (with its huge church-tower-type bronze-cast bell being leaped over) an allusion to